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Related Experiment Videos

Building a learning organization.

D A Garvin1

  • 1Harvard Business School.

Harvard Business Review
|June 7, 1993
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

To improve, organizations must first learn. This requires focusing on meaning, management, and measurement to foster a learning environment and drive continuous improvement.

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Area of Science:

  • Organizational Learning
  • Business Management
  • Continuous Improvement

Background:

  • Continuous improvement programs are widespread but often fail.
  • Low improvement rates indicate a fundamental issue in organizational development.
  • Companies struggle to improve without first establishing a learning capacity.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To define the core components of a learning organization.
  • To provide a framework for operationalizing learning within corporations.
  • To outline methods for measuring organizational learning and its impact.

Main Methods:

  • Defining a learning organization based on meaning, management, and measurement.
  • Identifying five key activities of learning organizations: problem-solving, experimentation, learning from experience, benchmarking, and knowledge transfer.

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  • Proposing a learning audit to measure cognitive, behavioral, and results-based changes.

    • Main Results:

    • A learning organization is defined by systematic problem-solving, experimentation, learning from experience and others, and efficient knowledge transfer.
    • Effective learning requires clear operational guidelines and robust measurement tools.
    • A comprehensive learning audit should assess cognitive, behavioral, and outcome-based changes.

    Conclusions:

    • Fostering a learning environment is the critical first step for organizational improvement.
    • Building a learning organization involves cultivating attitudes, commitments, and management processes.
    • Success requires a long-term commitment to learning, exemplified by companies like Analog Devices and Xerox.